When will David Cameron make a start on EU renegotiation?

THERE was one thing missing from David Cameron’s declaration on the Andrew Marr Show.

He said he will be prepared to campaign for Britain to leave the EU if he is unable to renegotiate our relationship with Brussels. Yet he gave no idea as to when this renegotiating is supposed to begin.

It is getting on for two years since the Prime Minister announced his great renegotiation with the EU. It was on January 23, 2013, to be precise in the same speech in which he promised an in-out referendum in 2017.

It was a good speech. After warming to his theme with a broad sweep of European history from Caesar’s legions to Churchill, Cameron laid bare the EU’s failings: its cavalier spending, its over-bearing bureaucracy, its remoteness from the concerns of ordinary citizens. “Can we justify a commission that gets ever larger?” he asked. “Can we carry on with an organisation that has a multi-billion-pound budget but not enough focus on controlling spending?”

No-one who listened was in any doubt: Cameron was serious about demanding wholesale reform of the EU so that it more resembles the free trade area which we thought we had joined in 1973 and is rather less like the meddlesome, undemocratic pseudo-state that the EU has become. Only if he had his way would he recommend “with heart and soul” that Britons vote to remain in the EU.

It certainly impressed one Tory backbencher who said it was the speech he had been waiting for a Conservative leader to give all his adult life

Ross Clark

It certainly impressed one Tory backbencher who said it was the speech he had been waiting for a Conservative leader to give “all his adult life”. That the MP was the since-defected Douglas Carswell underlines the declining credibility that Cameron has on the subject of his promised EU reform.

The problem is that no one can see much evidence of this great renegotiation going on. Who are the negotiators, with whom are they negotiating and what are they negotiating? And how is it all coming on? Are they making good progress or are they still at the stage where both sides are sitting across a table glowering at each other? That at least would be some kind of start but there is scant evidence that anyone is even doing that. Instead we just hear from time to time from EU officials spouting that Cameron can stuff his renegotiations and that Britain can either accept the EU’s rules or clear off.

It won’t do. Of course the referendum will not be guaranteed unless the Conservatives win next year’s general election. Even so the promised renegotiations are not something that can be crammed into a few months before the referendum in less than two and a half years’ time.

It took years to agree the terms of Britain’s entry to the then Common Market and since then the EU has hugely expanded with the result there are far more countries with which to negotiate.

If meaningful reforms are to result from Cameron’s initiative it is going to require a huge number of hours of detailed discussions with other EU leaders, individually and jointly. Potential supporters among other EU governments will have to be buttered up and persuaded that the EU needs to be recast as more of a free- trade area.

Failure to construct an alliance in favour of reform would result in the EU’s grandees being able to present this as a straight battle between recalcitrant Britain and the rest of the EU. While some might find attractive the idea of Britain battling the EU all by itself it would be a terrible outcome.

If Britain were to vote to leave the EU the Government would then be in the anxious position of having to negotiate a continuing free trade arrangement with the rest of the EU or otherwise face trade barriers being erected with some of our main trading partners. It would be far, far better if we could succeed in taking other countries along with us and instigating broad reforms of the EU, not just a British opt-out from certain things.

It was politically brave of Cameron to offer an in-out referendum in 2017. He knows – given the pressure on him when it seemed briefly as if the Scots would vote for independence – that he will be finished if the British people vote to leave the EU when he has campaigned to stay in, or vice versa. All authority would have drained from him.

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But he can’t wriggle out now. The situation that he envisaged on the Andrew Marr Show – in which he campaigns for Britain to leave the EU because no meaningful reform of the EU has been offered – would already put him in a position of huge weakness. He would effectively be saying to the British people: “Look, I failed to negotiate a better deal with Europe. Now vote with me to leave.”

His only real option is to go ahead and do as he promised: start his promised renegotiations and achieve significant concessions before referendum day. He won’t achieve that by making the odd speech in Britain. Very soon he is going to need to put boots on the ground in Europe’s conference rooms.

Never mind the polls that at present point to a Labour victory in 2015 the next election is very much in the grasp of Cameron. On the very most important issue – the economy – Labour is scoring well below the Tories in the polls. As election day approaches that is going to weigh heavily on Labour’s narrow lead.

But if David Cameron is going to win next year he isn’t going to do it by letting the EU issue drift. He needs to start those renegotiations now and be able to show some progress before May.